The Obama administration has put science and technology at the forefront of U.S. “engagement with the Muslim world.” Will it work?

The New Library of Alexandria

An old tale has it that when Alexander the Great’s engineer was laying out the plans for Alexandria, drawing a chalk line along the future perimeter of the great harbor city, he ran out of chalk. To complete the job, sacks of barley flour were taken from the troops’ rations and poured out in a long line. Just then, an enormous flock of birds that had been resting nearby descended and began to devour the plans. The birds were taken as a bad omen, and Alexander despaired, forecasting his project’s doom. His seer Aristander countered that they were a good omen, signifying that the city would be so prosperous as to attract flocks of people from all around to gain sustenance from it.

The year since President Barack Obama delivered his address “On a New Beginning” at Cairo University in June 2009 has seen a stream of new visitors alighting on Alexandria. This month, an international conference, “Initiatives in Education, Science and Culture: Towards Enhanced US-Muslim Countries Collaborations,” was held at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the resplendent $200 million New Library of Alexandria that was completed in 2002 near the site of the ill-fated original. The year 2011 has been dubbed the U.S.-Egypt Year of Science. One year into the Obama administration’s policy of engagement with “the Muslim world,” science and technology are at the head of the flock, and the buzzword in the air is “science diplomacy.” What does it portend?

A New Era of Science Diplomacy?

In his Cairo speech, President Obama announced the U.S. would open centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and appoint “Science Envoys to collaborate on programs that develop new sources of energy, create green jobs, digitize records, clean water, and grow new crops.” He also announced that the U.S. would partner with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (a fifty-seven-member coalition of Islamic states) to eradicate polio and promote child and maternal health.

In November 2009, the State Department announced the first three science envoys, whom the U.S. National Academies had chosen in consultation with the White House and State Department. In January they began their missions. Nobel Prize–winning chemical physicist Ahmed Zewail visited Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Former National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni traveled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and UNESCO in Paris. Bruce Alberts, editor-in-chief of Science and former National Academies president, visited Indonesia.

In an interview in Paris, Zerhouni sounded something like Julian Huxley in the heady days of UNESCO’s origins as he spoke of the opportunity to “break down barriers between peoples of the world in the exchange of knowledge, scientific and technological information, and to have, finally, for once in the world, the level of understanding we need to create an economic environment, social environment, a global environment where people will be able to understand each other.”¹ Bruce Alberts could have taken a page from the Skeptical Inquirer, saying that every nation needs science “to create a more rational world” and that the ordinary citizen should be educated to “think like a scientist” and consult evidence. But he also noted that science diplomacy is itself an experiment.²

Does International Scientific Cooperation Work?

In that spirit, one might ask whether there is any evidence that scientific collaboration can increase amity between nations. Japanese-U.S. relations were furthered by the Cooperative Science Program that grew out of a meeting between President Kennedy and Japanese Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda in June 1961. Similar arrangements were made as part of Nixon’s normalization of relations with China. Of course, the most high-profile international scientific collaborations took place between the space programs of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. These reached their zenith with the Apollo-Suyuz Test Docking in 1975.

By late 1978, some in Congress had grown concerned that valuable U.S. technology was being obtained by the Soviets through such projects. By 1982, with Russian tanks rolling over Afghanistan and marshal law imposed in Poland, President Reagan permitted the U.S.-Soviet space cooperation agreement to lapse. When push comes to shove, sovereign states put their own interests first.

Meanwhile, throughout the Cold War, an international collective of scientists was pursuing a different strategy to limit the arms race. The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, named for the town in Nova Scotia where the first conference was convened in 1957, followed on the London release in 1955 of the Russell-Einstein manifesto on the dangers of nuclear weapons. Pugwash was led by Joseph Rotblat, a British nuclear physicist who had resigned from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds. The aspirations of the group were expressed in its “Vienna Declaration,” a statement by the third conference, held in Kitzbühel and Vienna in 1958:

We believe that, as scientists, we have an important contribution to make toward establishing trust and co-operation among nations. . . . The ability of scientists all over the world to understand one another, and to work together is an excellent instrument for bridging the gap between nations and for uniting them around common aims. . . . It can contribute to the climate of mutual trust, which is necessary for the resolution of political conflicts between nations, and which is an essential background to effective disarmament. We hope scientists everywhere will recognize their responsibility, to mankind and to their own nations, to contribute thought, time, and energy to the furthering of international co-operation.

While Pugwash scientists quite noticeably did not end the Cold War, they are often credited with influencing international agreements such as the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 and the 1972 agreement on anti-ballistic missiles. Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for his work.

What is most noteworthy for present purposes is that the Pugwash Conferences belonged to the realm of civil society, not public diplomacy. Strictly speaking, they were not international initiatives. The organizers did not work under the auspices of any government, indeed scrupulously endeavoring to avoid the appearance of national or ideological partisanship. Consequently, Pugwash conversation could take the form of the free-flowing improvisations of academic colleagues, not the forced cadences of diplomats.

On the Ground

At the opening session of the “Enhanced U.S.-Muslim Countries Collaborations” conference at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the State Department’s Special Representative to Muslim Communities, Farah Pandith, was emphatically vacuous: “We heard the President talk about his commitment to increase the way in which we are activating our mechanisms to work on these important challenges. . . . As we think about the challenges and moving towards getting a resolution on many of these very difficult subjects, we see an increase in the way in which we are building capacity on the ground.”

Science diplomacy in Muslim-majority countries is a big, audacious idea worthy of candidate Obama. The government-run Overseas Private Investment Corporation claims to have already raised close to $2 billion in investment for technology development projects. Such investment is badly needed in societies where science is stagnant. Even still, in the year since Cairo, the percentage of the Egyptian public with a favorable opinion of Obama has slipped from 41 to 31 percent.³ It is too soon to tell whether America’s new science diplomacy will put in place significant advances or leave behind just so many feathered words.

The Ayatollah Khomeini once remarked that there are no jokes in Islam. If that is true, it is not for want of material. My latest favorite, related to me by Ibn Warraq, has to do with the rather unfunny hadith—one of the purported sayings and deeds of the Prophet and his companions—that requires death by stoning for adulterers. Once during a debate in London, Warraq made good on his entire career as the world’s leading apostate by coming up with the one-liner that he didn’t want to live in a society in which one gets stoned for committing adultery, but rather in a society in which one gets stoned and then commits adultery. But that was not the joke we were talking about.

It seems that the stone-the-adulterers commandment has long been the subject of theological controversy because although mandated by traditional religious law, or shari’a, it does not appear in the Quran. Instead, the Quran mentions the much less severe punishments of flogging or perhaps confinement. Some fornicators actually get into such things, maybe even in combination. Presumably a death sentence would have been important enough to merit inclusion in the revelation. Why didn’t Allah mention it before? According to another hadith, He did. Muhammad had written down the revealed verse on a piece of paper and placed it under his bed for safekeeping. One day while Muhammad had taken ill and the household was preoccupied with nursing him, a goat wandered in and ate it.

Islamic scholars took from this story not the lesson that I find obvious—that the goat was a second Messenger of Allah, who wanted to show Muhammad exactly what he could do with his bonkers idea of stoning adulterers. Instead, they used it to argue that were it not for the goat, the Quran would have (therefore should have?) included the missing verse and that this resolves the apparent doctrinal inconsistency—a hermeneutics of animal husbandry.

I’m sorry. This comic tale doesn’t really have a punch line. But it does reveal something about the nature of knowledge and epistemic authority in Islam, and this may go a long way toward explaining why Arab-Islamic societies never produced a scientific revolution while European societies did.

The Religion of He-Said, He-Said

A major preoccupation of Islamic scholars is verifying the “genuineness” of various hadith. Their preferred method is to trace the transmission from one source of these stories to the next, as in  

Abu al-Ayman narrated to us, saying: “Shu’yab narrated, saying: ‘Abu al-Zynad told us that Abd al-Rahman ibn Hurmuz al-A’raj . . . narrated to him that he heard from Abu Hurayrah who heard the Prophet saying...’¹

A text is considered trustworthy when one can establish an unbroken chain of personal testimonies leading back to a person who had direct contact with the Prophet. Islam is a religion of he-said, she-said—minus most of what she said, of course. (In the case of the goat-ate-my-surah story, however, the original source was said to be a woman, or rather a girl: Aisha, Muhammad’s child wife.)

The chain-link epistemology of hadith was mirrored by the structure of legal scholarship. Instruction took place through individualized apprenticeships rather than institutionalized degree programs. Intellectual and professional attainment came in the form of a certificate passing on the authorization to teach a particular subject, which would be issued by a particular teacher to a pupil who had mastered the subject to that teacher’s satisfaction.

Historian of science Toby Huff argues that this diffuse organization of knowledge hindered the development of science, which relies on peer criticism by appeal to objective standards held in common across a discipline.

It is due to this personalistic and particularistic factor that one finds literally hundreds of schools of law over the centuries, each founded by a faqih who, through the power of his intellect and the magic of his personality, established his own school of law capable of issuing its own rulings (fatwas), unconstrained by a body of precedent and universal legal principles. Thus, law, jurisprudence, as the paradigmatic body of knowledge in Islamic civilization, established a model of inquiry antithetical to that required of modern science, that is, a system based on personal authority rather than collective or impersonal collegial standards.²

The study of the natural philosophy and proto-science of the Greco-Roman world, which had been collected and translated by Arabic-language thinkers, took place under an additional burden. It was not permitted in the colleges, or madrasas, which were primarily devoted to the study of Islamic law. Instead, this heterdox knowledge had to be cultivated by individual scholars acting in a private capacity.

In Europe, by contrast, the legal innovations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries made possible the creation of legally autonomous corporate entities—including universities and, later, scientific associations—in which groups of thinkers could coalesce around shared projects and shared standards in relative freedom from Church and state power.

The Trouble with Half-Totalitarianism

The above history should serve as a corrective to some of our own received stories. One story says the West has Arabic-Islamic societies to thank for “passing the torch” of classical civilization. What the popular wisdom elides is that this learning typically survived not because of but in spite of the nature of Islam. Another story says that intellectual development under Islam was stunted because Islam is a totalitarian system. This is also half true. Islam was half totalitarian, so to speak. It was doctrinally totalitarian, in that matters of truth and justice were completely determined by religious tradition, hence the suppression of subversive thought in the madrasa system. Yet socially, Islamic learning was highly individualistic by comparison with elaborately institutionalized European learning.

Even the best Arabic-Islamic thinkers suffered for want of organized skepticism—the powerful effects of iterated peer-review feedback. Personal testimony is unreliable. Memory fails. Our pet ideas can get eaten by life’s goats. The more watchful eyes there are, the better the chances that someone will catch the next one that slips into the tent looking for dinner.

Notes

[1] This comes from the hadith collection Sahih Al-Bukhari, book 11, no. 876.

[2] Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, 2nd ed., (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 228.

It was March, and the air at the University of Paris was restive. Spring was bringing a confrontation between the forces of tradition and the ideals of freedom that would have far-reaching consequences for life in the modern West ever after. But this was not the overcrowded suburban branch campus of Nanterre where on March 22, 1968, student protesters took over administration buildings, touching off waves of unrest that crested in the upheavals of May ’68. The year was 1277, and the revolutionaries were not the undergraduates but the faculty. The spokesman for the established order was not the Office of the Dean but the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier.

In March 1277, Bishop Tempier promulgated a now-famous condemnation of 219 errors in theology and natural philosophy that he believed were being entertained and discussed by scholars of the university's faculty of arts. Among this syllabus of errors appeared the following propositions:

That there is no more excellent state than to study philosophy.

That the only wise men in the world are the philosophers.

That one should not hold anything unless it is self-evident or can be manifested by self-evident principles.

That man should not be content with authority to have certitude about any question.

That there is no rationally disputable question that the philosopher ought not to dispute and determine, because reasons are derived from things. It belongs to philosophy under one or another of its parts to consider all things.

That our intellect by its own natural power can attain to a knowledge of the first cause.

That we can know God by His essence in this mortal life.

The Condemnation of 1277 was intended to control discussion of theological matters being carried out by members of the faculty. The Bishop’s chief concern seems to have been that too many were choosing Aristotle over God. Above all, the Condemnation asserted God’s power to bring about anything he chooses, short of a logical contradiction. This absolute power appeared to be subverted by those who, under the sway of the philosopher, sought to explain the world as a system of natural causes and principles.ⁱ Under Tempier’s decree, they would now do so on pain of excommunication.

The point of revisiting these events is not to raise three cheers for the forbidden beliefs (although I must confess that as a philosopher, I find the first two extremely self-evident). The point is to uncover some unexpected answers to why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in Arabic-Islamic societies, where its preconditions had existed for centuries.

The Medieval Invention of Society

In the popular imagination—particularly among friends of Reason and Enlightenment—the story of the rise of science is the story of the monolith of Church power being shattered by individual heroes like Bruno and Galileo. In this narrative, the scientists are champions of personal freedom as much as the soixant huitards of Nanterre. Astronomy under Islam, meanwhile, remains medieval because Islam’s power remains totalitarian. While this telling of the story contains much truth that is by now familiar, it also obscures some truth that is counterintuitive and far less appreciated.

The thirteenth-century intellectual struggle at the University of Paris illuminates how Christianity had already helped to prepare the way (in many ways inadvertently) for free, naturalistic inquiry. This had less to do with Christian doctrine as such than with certain innovations in Church law developed in the preceding two centuries.

When we hear the story of 1277 today, we must not take for granted its most important fact: there was something to which the condemnation was addressed. The university was not an extension of Church hierarchy but rather an independent institution with its own identity, purpose, and structure.ⁱⁱ The punishments that the Bishop could bring to bear as disincentives to discourage heresy were not civil but religious. He could threaten errant scholastics with removing their rights to membership in the Body of Christ; he could not determine by ecclesiastical fiat the curriculum of the university or the membership of its faculty. But what is for us unremarkable was once unthinkable.

Paradoxically, the relative independence of the University of Paris, and countless institutions like it, was a result of an earlier assertion of Church authority now known as the papal revolution. Beginning in the middle of the eleventh century, the hierarchy struggled to free itself from interference by secular officials, from the local to the imperial level, who claimed jurisdiction over religious affairs. The key battle was over secular rulers’ claim to responsibility for the appointment or investiture of clergy like bishops and abbots, the so-called “investiture controversy.” It began in 1076 with Pope Gregory VII excommunicating a defiant Emperor Henry IV, who shot back that the pope had become a “false monk.” It ended with the Concordat of Worms of 1122, which liberated the Church from imperial control.

Masters of the Universitas

To explicate and legitimize the emerging political settlements, Christian monks wove together church law and European common law with the resources of the Roman legal tradition—by way of recently discovered manuscripts—to invent the novel system of canon law. In this system, the church would function as a distinct and legally autonomous collective entity with the right to own property, to assemble, to enact and judge its own statutes, and to engage in representative governance, both internal to itself and externally in the broader civil and political order—in a word, it would become a corporation. As Harold J. Berman contends in Law and Revolution, the papal revolution opened the door for the creation of similar entities in the secular world, making possible a new model of society as an aggregate of multiple collective agents, each with its own legal jurisdiction.ⁱⁱⁱ

By at least 1215, the scholars at the University of Paris had established themselves as one such corporate body. Indeed, university comes from the Latin term for corporation, universitas. It was in virtue of the university’s independent institutional powers that fifty years later the faculty of arts could vote to enact a statute that made required reading of the natural works of Aristotle, the very books the good Bishop wished he could close but couldn’t.

The popular narrative is correct that the evolution of science depended on the emancipation of thought from Christian power. Yet this very emancipation depended on a structural transformation of European life set in motion by Christian power itself, as has been argued convincingly by the historian of science Toby E. Huff.^iv And it is not individual freedom but corporate freedom that deserves the role of chief protagonist. As I will explore in my next column, the comparative failure of science under Islam is not explained by a lack of individualism but rather an excess of it, a failure to develop institutions that could serve as the home of independent inquiry.

Notes

ⁱEdward Grant, “Science and Theology in the Middle Ages,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 55.

ⁱⁱToby E. Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 194.

ⁱⁱⁱHarold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).

^ivHuff, The Rise of Early Modern Science.

Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of history will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

What Golden Age?

This Golden Age is rightly held up as one of the glories of Arabic-Islamic civilization. However, it only makes more pointed the question of how Arabic-language science (defined broadly as natural philosophy) came to be so rapidly and totally surpassed by European science. As the historian of science Toby Huff points out with regard to astronomy in particular:

Arab astronomers from the eleventh to the fourteenth century established a broad-based research tradition aimed at reforming the Ptolemaic (geocentric) planetary model. These astronomers—in both Eastern and Western Islam—wanted a theoretical planetary model that conformed to what really is. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the combined efforts of the Marâgha School of astronomers, capped by the work of Ibn al-Shatir, finally arrived at a planetary model mathematically equivalent to the Copernican model of a century and a half later. But having arrived there, Ibn al-Shatir and his successors failed to make the leap to the heliocentric view—the leap that distinguished the Copernican achievement—and thereby failed to achieve the philosophical and metaphysical transformation that we call the scientific revolution . . . .¹

Despite all of these advantages—research funding, the resources of Greek philosophy and science, and great minds such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Razi, al-Baghdadi, al-Biruni, al-Haytham, and Ibn Rushd—Arab societies did not give rise to modern science.

The eclipse of Arabic science is often explained by pointing to external geopolitical factors, such as the re-conquest of Spain by Christian forces from 1085 onward or the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258. However, in other intellectual capitals, such as Damascus and Cairo, developments proceeded largely undisturbed for centuries. Arab astronomy and medicine were reaching their zenith at the end of the thirteenth century—well after the purported disruption by external forces (and long before colonialist interference by European powers). The great observatory that was home to the Marâgha School was founded near Tabriz, Iran, in the year following the Mongol invasion of Baghdad. Although it ceased to function barely forty-five years later, its end appears to have been hastened not by foreign hostilities but by some impulses from within.²

Another take on the decline of Arabic science is that it never declined because it never really existed. In this view, science and mathematics were carried out by a small number of extraordinary individuals whose activities and outlooks were never fully assimilated to the mainstream—that is, Islamic—culture. As these individuals disappeared or their patronage dried up, their work dissipated. Since there was no established tradition, we have no need for an explanation of its decline by appeal to general causes, endogenous or otherwise.

Arguing against this view, the so-called “marginality thesis,” A. I. Sabra has pointed out that many of those who taught secular philosophy and medicine were also Islamic legal scholars; that leaders in higher mathematics were often muwaqqits, official time keepers employed by mosques; and that scientific literature could be found in the libraries of the religiously affiliated madrasas.³ This evidence suggests that Greek learning had been “Islamized” or “naturalized” by integration with the intellectual, social, and institutional structures of Islam and Arab culture.

Whig History of Science

The most eyebrow-raising response to the question of what caused the decline of Arabic science is to deny that there really is such a question. Some have maintained that the question only arises if we assume that the historical trajectory of Europe is normative for other societies, such that divergence from that trajectory demands an explanation. To catch the drift of this criticism, have another listen to Huff’s language. He tells us that Arabic scientists “failed to make the leap . . . that distinguished the Copernican achievement” and “failed to achieve the . . . transformation that we call the scientific revolution.”

In his book, The Making of Islamic Science, Muzaffar Iqbal labels this kind of discourse Whig history, in which “judgments passed on the scientific developments of a previous civilization are invariably based on the developments in modern science. This creates historiographic problems and entails the danger of unconsciously slipping from the historical fact into a Whiggish view of history, as if the final purpose of the cultivation of science in the other civilization was merely to create modern science.”⁴ Iqbal seems to suggest that the question of decline will itself decline as more informed and culturally sophisticated historians prevail.

This position has a whiff of plausibility, and not just because it nods to the contingency of history. Apart from a belief in Providence or Giambattista Vico’s “principles of universal history,” would it have been true to say in early renaissance Florence that a scientific revolution was going to happen there? Furthermore, isn’t asking why there was no Arab Galileo like asking why there was no Chinese Puccini or Persian Dante? China produced Peking opera and Persia produced Rumi. It would be a bizarre form of tunnel vision to see these singular achievements merely as abortive attempts at the achievements of other culture.

In the case of science, however, there are actual continuities between the Middle Eastern and European traditions that Peking opera and Italian opera do not share. It is precisely these continuities—such as the survival of Ibn Sina’s Canon—that are cited admiringly by those who wish to highlight the legacy of Arabic science. More fundamentally, the historiographical critique conflates motivation and justification. Undoubtedly some historians who accept the “decline” question are in part motivated by a belief that scientific modernity is on balance not all that regrettable, or by an interest in addressing the contemporary plight of science in Muslim-majority countries. These motives and interests give the question salience. However, they do not by themselves impugn the objectivity, truth, or justification of any particular claim that a historian makes. If Iqbal finds scientific modernity regrettable, then when he reads in Huff that Arab scientists “failed to make” the leap and “failed to achieve” the transformation to Copernicanism, he can substitute “were saved from making” and “managed to avoid.”⁵ The flip in salience will not change the truth-value of Huff’s analysis one whit.

Iqbal floats the idea that the alternative to Whiggish comparative history of science is to “examine the nature of science in Islamic civilization from within its own framework and see where it could have gone.” However, on its face, this is perfectly consistent with the comparative approach he rejects, for the way of Europe is one way that Islamic science could have gone. Of course, a good history will attempt to gain an appreciation of a social practice from within, from the perspective of the practitioners. In this case, it will inquire—as Sabra, Huff, and others do—into the proximate causes that shaped the role of the muwaqqit, for example. In principle, enough accounts of this kind will add up to a historical explanation of why Arabic science did not follow the trajectory of European science—or, if you prefer, why European science did not follow the trajectory of Arabic science.

The next installment of “Circumnavigations” will edge closer to this “why.”

Notes

1. Toby E. Huff, The rise of early modern science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 87.
2. —. 171-172.
3. —. 84.
4. The making of Islamic science, Muzzafar Iqbal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009), 151.
5. Iqbal, trained as a biochemist, is the founder-president of the Center for Islam and Science, based in Canada. He has also worked with the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (on which, see my previous column). He told PBS in 2003 that he was “disenchanted” with practical science and that his biggest desire was to see “a revival of the Islamic tradition of learning.” See “Closer to Truth: Ask the Experts: Muzaffar Iqbal, Ph.D.”; accessed 12 January 2010.

The official results of the disputed Iranian presidential election in June 2009 aren’t the only unbelievable numbers to come out of Tehran lately. This fall, the publisher of the peer-reviewed journal Engineering and Computers withdrew a paper co-authored by Iran’s science minister, Kamran Daneshjou, after Nature magazine revealed that it had been plagiarized. The paper, “Analysis of Critical Ricochet Angle Using Two Space Discretization Methods,” contained significant portions of text, figures, and tables copied from a 2002 article by South Korean researchers in the Journal of Physics.¹

Critics have also questioned the legitimacy of the academic credentials of Daneshjou, a professor at Iran University of Science and Technology (his online vita currently states that he did doctoral studies at the Imperial Collage of London).² As it happens, Kaneshjou was running the Interior Ministry’s election headquarters in June, and his new appointment came courtesy of the man who claimed victory, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Maybe it does all add up.

Perhaps this behavior is to be expected from a member of Iran’s mullahcractic regime, which has perfected the tradition of taqiyya, or religiously-sanctioned dissimulation. What is more shocking is that Iran is among the more scientifically productive nations in the Islamic world—for present purposes, defined as the fifty-seven members of the intergovernmental Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

A Revolution Deferred

Here are some astonishing figures from Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan:

A study by academics at the International Islamic University Malaysia showed that OIC countries have 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7…. Forty-six Muslim countries contributed 1.17% of the world’s science literature, whereas 1.66% came from India alone and 1.48% from Spain. Twenty Arab countries contributed 0.55%, compared with 0.89% by Israel alone. The [U.S. National Science Foundation] records that of the 28 lowest producers of scientific articles in 2003, half belong to the OIC.³

Another survey found that of the approximately 1,800 universities in OIC countries,

only 312 publish journal articles. A ranking of the 50 most published among them yields these numbers: 26 are in Turkey, 9 in Iran, 3 each in Malaysia and Egypt, 2 in Pakistan, and 1 in each of Uganda, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan, and Azerbaijan. For the top 20 universities, the average yearly production of journal articles was about 1500, a small but reasonable number. However, the average citation per article is less than 1.0 (the survey report does not state whether self-citations were excluded).

Even Turkey, the most scientifically productive of OIC states, produced only 88,000 research papers between 1996 and 2005, less than the typical output of a single Ivy League university in the same period.⁴

Recent years have seen bold hikes in scientific research funding by governments such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Qatar, but nothing yet seems to have made a dent in the fundamental reality: Science in the Muslim world is moribund.

Abstaining from Science

In 1979, the OIC established a new body to promote science: the Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (ISESCO). Headquartered in an ostentatious complex in Rabat, Morocco, and maintaining regional offices in Paris, Tehran, Chad, the Union of the Comoros, and the Emirate of Sharjah, ISESCO would, according to its charter, “support the efforts of Member States in developing programmes of education and technical and practical training; and encourage researchers and inventors from the Member States.” Last year, ISESCO claimed it would partner with UN bodies such as UNESCO and UNICEF to undertake close to two hundred projects costing around $6 million.

Yet according to Hoodbhoy, the achievements of this and sister initiatives (such as the OIC’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation) to date have amounted to little more than “sporadically held conferences on disparate subjects, a handful of research and travel grants, and small sums for repair of equipment and spare parts.”

In 2006, ISESCO published a Guide for the Incorporation of Reproductive Health and Gender Concepts into Islamic Education Curricula, obviously a critically important subject area where some scientific facts are in order. The Guide, which can be found on ISESCO’s Web site, is addressed to curriculum developers, textbook writers, and those responsible for training instructors in formal Islamic education for students aged six to nineteen. Its introduction stresses the need “to supply, at the proper time, adolescents with appropriate health information on the biological aspects within the framework of Islamic rulings and values” and emphasizes “the fact that Sharia, whether in its original or interpretative sources, is the only source for establishing, interpreting, clarifying, and incorporating reproductive health issues, including adolescent health, in the programs of formal education.”⁵

What follows contains not a shred of science but instead a series of checklists and tips for imparting Sharia rulings on matters of health, hygiene, and sexual ethics. The ISESCO authors mention the Islamic basis for upholding “equality in human dignity” and “good treatment of the girl and kindness towards her” and opposing female circumcision and “indiscrimination between the sexes” (sic?). They also instruct teachers that Islam forbids, among other things, fornication, homosexuality, intercourse during menstruation, and khulwa (an unrelated man and woman being alone together). At the same time, they assert that Islamic law justifies polygamous marriage and, above all, abstinence.

The student should adhere to the lofty Islamic morals and ideals that call for modesty, lowering one’s gaze, avoiding mixing and being alone with a person with whom one can be intimate, abstinence, resisting shameful deeds, avoiding any provocative act or item of dress that may encourage sexual harassment and lapsing into harlotry . . . [and] observe abstinence before marriage.

And this from a publication that was “compiled in cooperation with United Nations Population Fund”!⁶

In this Guide, as in numerous other documents, ISESCO is only doing its job. Rather than seeking Muslim integration with the global research and academic communities, its stated mission is to advance science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.” In this case, ISESCO does not even do students the service of setting forth the relevant empirical evidence for the purpose of beating it senseless with religious precepts.

Elsewhere, ISESCO dispenses with pretexts at pedagogy altogether and joins in familiar Islamist propaganda against Jews. In Protection of Islamic and Christian Holy Sites in Palestine, the proceedings of a conference held in Amman in November 2004, Adnane Ibrahim Hassan Al Subah writes, “Jews are the enemies of Allah, the enemies of faith and of the worship of Allah”⁷—not a paragon of experimentally testable hypotheses. In a sickening touch, copies of this ISESCO publication were distributed at an OIC-sponsored “Inter-institutional Forum on Universal Shared Values: Challenges and New Paradigms,” attended by various UN dignitaries and held in the chambers of the UN Human Rights Council in December 2008 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN gadfly David Littman sent an open letter of complaint the following month; he has yet to receive a response from the Islamic Scientific, Educational, and Cultural Organization.

While ISESCO has the right to promote Islamic values, some of the practices it endorses are arguably contrary to international human rights standards found in treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Child, to which most OIC states are signatories. Certainly the UN has no business partnering with them in its efforts to support responsible family planning. This is all the more disappointing because ISESCO’s Sharia-based approach described above is only the most conservative way to promulgate reproductive health science within the framework of Islamic values. There are alternatives, such as a program pioneered by the UN Population Fund that trains Afghan clerics on issues of women’s health and rights.

The broader question remains: what explains the malaise of Muslim science and what can be done about it?

References

1. “Exclusive: Paper Co-Authored by Iran’s Science Minister Duplicates Earlier Paper – September 22, 2009,” The Great Beyond. Available at blogs.nature.com, accessed 28 November 2009.
2. Borzou Daragahi, “IRAN: Proposed Education Minister Accused of Making Up His Degrees,” Los Angeles Times (August 29, 2009). Available at latimesblogs.latimes.com accessed 28 November 2009.
3. Pervez Hoodbhoy, “Science and the Islamic World: The Quest for Rapprochment,” Physics Today (August 2007). Available at ptonline.aip.org accessed 25 November 2009. Hoodbhoy is also the author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991). See also the special issue of "Islam and Science," Nature 444, 19 (2006).
4. Ehsan Masood, “New Wave for Islamic Science,” BBC News (February 16, 2009).
5. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/Menu.php; accessed 25 November 2009.
6. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/ISESCO%20Guide%20for%20the%20Incorporation/P1.php.
7. http://www.isesco.org.ma/english/publications/Protection%20of%20islamic%20and%20chrestian%20holy%20sites%20in%20Palestine/p18.php; accessed 25 November 2009.

Two classical Confucian philosophers once had a famous disagreement over the morality of music. Mozi mounted a utilitarian case in his “Codemnation of Music”: “What benefits men, the man of humane principles will carry out; what does not benefit them, he will leave alone. . . . Sounding bells, striking drums, strumming zithers, blowing pipes, and waving shields and axes in the war dance do nothing to feed the people when they are hungry, clothe them when they are cold, or give them rest when they are weary.”

The great Xunzi responded that if Mozi’s policy were to be implemented, society “would be pressed to such extremity by his measures that all clothing would be coarse and gross and all food would be bad and detestable, with only hardship and grief when music and joy have been condemned.”¹ But Xunzi did not defend music by asserting its intrinsic value or extolling its aesthetic properties. Instead, he accepted Mozi’s utilitarian premises, insisting that music is valuable just because it is necessary to preserve civic order.

When music is centered and balanced, the people are harmonious and not [consumed by] dissipation. When music is sober and dignified, the people are uniform and not chaotic. When people are harmonious and unified, the army is stiff and the cities secure. . . . When music is ornate and seduces [people] to malice, then the people are dissipated, indolent, crude, and base. Dissipation and indolence lead to chaos, crudity and baseness to contention. When there is chaos and contention, the army is soft and the cities are pillaged.

Referring to the sage-rulers of antiquity, Xunzi concluded:

Thus the Former Kings were cautious about what they stirred [the people] with. They used ritual to make their wills [conform] to the Way, music to harmonize their sounds, government to unify their actions, and punishments to prevent licentiousness. Rituals, music, punishments, and government are ultimately, a means to make the people’s minds similar and bring about the ordered Way. ²

Music is a means for moral instruction, ritualized rehearsal of social roles, and ultimately discipline and control—hegemony in harmony. No less than sound, it seems that science in China has been political from its beginning.

China’s Scientific Revolution

The story of modern science in China begins with the introduction of mathematical astronomy by Jesuit missionaries during the late Ming period in the 1580s. In 1592, the Ministry of Rites discovered that the Astrocalendrical Bureau had miscalculated the date of the lunar eclipse by a full day. This was going to foul up the timing of all the auspicious and inauspicious events. Fortunately for them, the Jesuits were adept at dealing with calendar crises, having not long before resolved a European controversy over the date of Easter.

In the 1630s the government was persuaded to undertake a major calendar reform, and as Benjamin Elman explains in A Cultural History of Modern Science in China, this “opened the door for leaders of the mind and Qing dynasties to accept Jesuits as calendrical experts, just as earlier rulers had accepted Indian, Persian, and Muslim specialists.”³ So long as they continued to supply expert assistance in astronomical and geographical matters, the missionaries were tolerated by the emperor and eventually incorporated into the bureaucracy. Throughout the eighteenth century, the Jesuits introduced a variety of European technologies. But they failed to keep apace with the latest scientific advances back home. Consequently, the Earth-centered cosmological system of Tycho Brahe was still being taught in China in the nineteenth century.⁴

With the help of the Protestant missions, modern science was born in China: “From 1850 to 1870, a core group of missionaries and Chinese co-workers in Guangzhou, Ningbo, Beijing, and Shanghai translated many works on astronomy, mathematics, medicine, as well as botany, geography, geology, mechanics, and navigation.” Scientific training was centered on the military arsenals, shipyards, and factories of the coastal cities where armaments and ships were being constructed. After 1895 and China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, elites increasingly agitated for political reform and modernization. As Elman observes,

Chinese radicals linked political, social, and economic revolution to their perception that a scientific revolution was also required. Those who were educated abroad at Western universities such as Cornell or sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation for medical study in the United States after 1914, as well as those trained locally at higher-level missionary schools in China, often regarded modern science as a revolutionary application of scientific methods and objective learning to solve all modern problems.⁵

Here began a political rhetoric fusing scientific advance, technological application, and Chinese national aspiration, the same rhetoric that later resounded in the May Fourth Movement after 1919, up through Maoist “mass science” to Hu Jintao’s Scientific Development Concept.

Humming Along

Today the country’s enormous investment in science is overwhelmingly pragmatic, driven by short-term technological applications. In 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Science magazine that only 5 percent of the nation’s total spending on science goes toward basic research (by comparison, basic research accounts for 17.5 percent of the U.S. government’s science funding).⁶ The ubiquity of the Chinese term keji—literally, science and technology—illustrates the importance of applied knowledge.

It would be mistake to think of China’s scientific revolution as a fast-motion replay of Europe’s. Science did not come to China as it had come to Europe, and most Chinese elites did not come to science for the reasons that their European counterparts had. Early modern European science depended heavily on private commercial interests and autonomous professional associations (like the Royal Society). Its propagandists pressed for knowledge to improve the human condition but also to read the mind of God or the book of Nature as an end in itself. An anti-authoritarian ideology arose in response to confrontations with the Church. Chinese science, by contrast, evolved in symbiosis with state power, and its propagandists championed it as a means to national development.

In this way, from its origins the Chinese scientific establishment was organized and mobilized to achieve the practical ends of those in power. But perhaps the best explanation for the dearth of political dissent among professional scientists is more pedestrian than philosophical. Since Tiananmen, the shocking brutality of the crack- down and the constriction of civil society have surely taught many would-be disharmonious scientists that silence is the only sensible option. More importantly, they have so much to lose. Today’s technoscience professionals are members of a comfortable middle class with enviable positions to look out for and reliable research funding to look forward to.

China’s vast economic engines churn ahead, and its scientists hum along.

Notes

1. John Knoblock, ed., Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 128.
2. Paul Rakita Goldin, Rituals of the Way: The Philosophy of Xunzi (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 79–80.
3. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
4. —. A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 18.
5. —. “New Directions in the History of Modern Science in China Global Science and Comparative History,” Isis, 98(3): 522.
6. See “Science: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao Sees Science as a Key to Development,” (accessed 17 October 2009).

As its gangplank rose dramatically, the tanker’s public address system blared symphonic pomp. The music, rousing to the point of desperation, sounded at turns like a knockoff of the theme from Star Wars, then Superman, as if John Williams had been forced at gunpoint to produce an anthem in a single sitting. From beneath this rose the sound of vigorous clattering from a core of traditional Chinese drummers assembled on the dock. Clouds of confetti descended onto the expectant crowd, a few hundred journalists, local government officials, ordinary onlookers, and one curious American philosopher. As the massive ship pulled away from the Shanghai port, a fleet of sleek hostesses in red silk gowns and a pack of schoolchildren in imperial yellow tracksuits waved goodbye to the crew.

Those on board were not celebrities on a luxury cruise or military officers deploying for a foreign campaign. They were scientists. Their vessel was the Xue Long, Snow Dragon, and it was bound for the South Pole on the twenty-fifth Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition.

When the Xue Long set off in October 2008, I was in Shanghai visiting with leaders of the municipal branch of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology. After several weeks of working in cramped offices in gloomy Beijing, I enjoyed the time in Shanghai, where I found the air somewhat freer and the espresso easier to come by. I was there on behalf of the Center for Inquiry, seeking to interest a division of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST) in conducting the Worldviews of Scientists study.

Pioneered by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, the Worldviews series is an international sociological survey of the religious, ethical, and social opinions of working scientists. Above all, I was curious about the extent to which the scientific community in China exemplified the critical rationalist spirit in their public lives. One might expect scientists to be occupationally committed to anti-authoritarianism and freedom of inquiry, intellectual honesty and pluralism. It was probably no accident that an astrophysicist, Fang Lizhi, had such an important part in inspiring the student unrest that led to Tiananmen Square. Scientists are a disharmonious bunch. How willing could they be to sing in tune to the Party’s official march?

Big Science

At the most recent national congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October 2007, President Hu Jintao trumpeted “scientific development” and the Harmonious Society, directing the government to

thoroughly apply the Scientific Outlook on Development, continue to emancipate the mind, persist in reform and opening up, pursue development in a scientific way, promote social harmony, and strive for new victories in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. . . . Emancipating the mind is a magic instrument for developing socialism with Chinese characteristics, reform and opening up provide a strong driving force for developing it, and scientific development and social harmony are basic requirements for developing it.¹

Soon after I arrived in Beijing, my colleagues made it clear to me that for official purposes, building the Harmonious Society would mean tapping into scientific methods, but it also would mean placing limits on the scope of scientific values. With the utmost congeniality and reasonableness, they explained that survey questions about religion would be deemed too divisive and sensitive, and questions about politics could be considered seditious. Further, the term “skepticism” was to be avoided because what remained of the Party’s ideologues might consider it a threat to Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

This should not have been surprising. After all, CAST is a part of the bureaucracy, not an independent, non-governmental professional association (genuinely independent civil society organizations are still almost unheard of in China). On Wednesday afternoons the entire office—spare two junior female researchers—emptied out to attend the meetings of the Party. For those who seek professional positions of privilege, it is of course the only thing going.

On December 10, 2008—the 60^th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—over three hundred Chinese dissidents released Charter 08, an open letter calling for human rights, civil liberties, private property, and a democratic, federated republic. The letter was organized by Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic, and the list of signatories included more lawyers and entrepreneurs than professional scientists. One prominent scientist signatory was Jian Qisheng, who was arrested following his involvement in Tiananmen and subsequently spent four years in prison after commemorating the massacre in 1999. Jian studied philosophy and worked as a physicist. But, perhaps significantly, he is now identified as a former physicist.²

Scientist-Reformers of the 1980s

There was a moment in recent Chinese politics when elite scientists were in the vanguard of dissent. Ironically, this was not the result of the CCP’s antipathy towards science but rather its embrace of science in the post-Mao era. Central to Deng Xiaoping’s reform efforts, begun in 1978, was a new policy on science and technology. Mao was faulted for his utopianism, for becoming unhinged from empirical reality. While carrying on the traditional Marxist rhetoric of the “science” of dialectical materialism, Mao had little but suspicion and hostility for the scientific establishment. The Cultural Revolution made scientists targets in the class struggle, branding the Chinese Academy of Sciences a “bourgeois headquarters.”

Once in power, Deng rallied for a return to scientific rationality. He recruited scientists and technologists as essential partners in effective policymaking and governance in a modern China. By the early 80s, leading specialists were being incorporated into the bureaucracy as the staff and directors of permanent consultative bodies. But in some cases, this close association ended up blowing back on the government. The period is described by Alice L. Miller, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, in her excellent study Science and Dissent in Post-Mao China: The Politics of Knowledge:

Especially among those in the “basic” sciences—those pursuing scientific knowledge for its own sake—a conflict of professional mission and identity with the regime’s utilitarian goals for science emerged. Among some, the reforms were seen not as alleviating problems in the scientific community but as making things worse. By the late 1980s many scientists were deeply frustrated with the reforms, anxious over their jobs and futures, and alarmed at their declining standing in a rapidly changing society. A few, at least, felt a deepening alienation from a regime that they had previously supported, spurring them onto the path of political dissent.³

Miller argues that the public political dissent of leading figures in the scientific community—Fang Lizhi and others, such as Xu Liangying, Jin Guantao, and Li Xingmin—was inspired by the powerful anti-authoritarian norms and Enlightenment values of science itself:

For scientists such as Fang and Xu, the anti-authoritarian norms of science translated easily into a classically liberal politics. The message these scientists carried into the larger political arena defended above all the sanctity and worth of individual autonomy and conscience above the claims of state and society. . . . the emergence of a renewed liberal voice in China’s political arena in the 1980s was in significant part a natural extension of what some scientists believed to be the norms of healthy science into politics.⁴

What became of this scientific dissent in the intervening years? Was it suppressed by the force of the post-Tienanmen crackdown, or were there other dynamics at work?

A Musical Interlude

One afternoon my colleagues held a lunchtime party in honor of my visit. We all drove over to a local karaoke lounge for a buffet-style meal followed by what turned out to be several convivial hours of drink, chat, and of course, singing. Everyone took turns at his or her favorites, often with wild abandon.

Someone had brought along an acoustic guitar, so when my turn came around (after first agreeing to sing karaoke on John Denver's “Country Roads,” which somehow everyone knew by heart), I taught the group the chorus to “Free Falling,” the wonderful rock ’n’ roll anthem by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. As we belted out “Now I’m free . . . free falling!” it felt like the right song for the hour, putting us in the shoes of a skydiver who thrills to the rush of the leap even though he cannot control the direction in which he spirals. It was now late afternoon, the workday was ending, and we could linger no longer. We left the lounge and headed back into the drone of Beijing.

Notes

1. President Hu’s speech, presumably translated by the Chinese Embassy, can be found at http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zt/768675/t375502.htm.
2. See http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3343/prmID/172
3. H. Lyman Miller, Science and dissent in post-Mao China: The politics of knowledge (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1996), 69.
4. —. Science and dissent in post-Mao China: The politics of knowledge (Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 1996), 4.

I don’t get to use this joke very often, nor should I. But I have come upon the occasion recently by re-reading the Upanishads, and that in the course of exploring further the subject of my previous column; namely, whether there is a convergence of modern science and classical Indian or neo-Hindu thought.

Reading the Vedas

The Upanishads are recognized as the wellspring of Indian philosophy. They date from the so-called Vedic period, between approximately 2500 and 600 B.C.E. The texts of this period, the four Vedas, are in turn divided into four sections, the Upanishads being the most reflective and speculative of them.

By the time I got to Chandogya Upanishad, one of the oldest and most revered, I was reminded that while my enlightenment-by-mail joke is not much of a joke, it is not that much of a caricature either. A sampling:

“Bring hither a fig from there.”

“Here it is, sir.”

“Divide it.”

“It is divided, Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“These rather fine seeds, Sir.”

“Of these, please, divide one.”

“It is divided, Sir.”

“What do you see there?”

“Nothing at all, Sir.”

Then he said to him: “Verily, my dear, that finest essence which you do not perceive—verily, my dear from that finest essence this great [fig tree] thus arises.

“Believe me, my dear,” said he, “that which is the finest essence—this whole world has that as its self. That is Reality. That is Ātman. That art thou [Tat tvam asi].”¹

“Now, when one is sound asleep; composed, serene, and knows no dream—that is the Self (Ātman),” he said. “That is the immortal, the fearless. That is Brahman. . . .²

The past, the future, and what the Vedas declare—

This whole world the illusion-maker projects out of this.

And in it by illusion the other is confined.

Now, one should know that Nature is illusion [maya], and that the Mighty Lord is the illusion-maker.³

Just as I felt I was not going to get it, Kena Upanishad assured me I might be on to something:

It is not understood by those who [say they] understand It.

It is understood by those who [say they] understand It not.⁴

It was hard not to be reminded of Feynman’s remark that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don’t understand quantum mechanics. The Upanishads set forth a majestic metaphysics of Ātman and Brahman. The latter is the ultimate or Absolute, the universal principle as encountered objectively; the former is that same Absolute as encountered subjectively. Ātman, or Self, manifests in individual selves. Brahman manifests in the universe and in individual divinities.

Carl Sagan once credited Hinduism with being “the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the earth or the sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.” The Vedas: “Verily, in the beginning this world was Brahman, the limitless One. . . . Truly, for him east and the other directions exist not, nor across, nor below, nor above.”

In a series of celebrated addresses to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, Swami Vivekananda sought to portray Hinduism as a universal faith on which the world’s religions and sciences are converging: “From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in Hindu religion” (emphasis added).⁵

Today the same strategy is still seen, stripped down to a crude ideology, in the discourse of the Hindu Right or Hindutva movement. A textbook published by the Hindutva organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad describes the Vedas as “not just old religious books, but as books which contain many true scientific facts,” saying that “these ancient scriptures of the Hindus can be treated as scientific texts.”⁶

A Saffron Science?

Is this a historical thesis about the causal role of Indian ideas in the actual development of science? If so, then it is flatly false. Indian philosophy had very little readership in Europe until the early 1800s, more than a century after the methodological revolution launched by Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Huygens, Hooke, Boyle, and Newton was more or less complete. Indian thought was most influential on post-Enlightenment and Romantic figures like Arthur Schopenhauer, who believed that science fails to grasp the “inner nature” of things. Far from being an inspiration for modern science, the Upanishads were most useful to those European thinkers who felt that empiricism was missing something.

If “Vedic science” is not a statement about the intellectual genealogy of modern science, what is it? Perhaps it is the idea that ancient Indian thinkers independently discovered key insights of the sciences or at least something that resembles them. Maybe Vedic science is not so much a historical thesis as an analogical thesis. Consider the nature-is-illusion doctrine, or maya, here in a comment from the chapter on “Hinduism and Science” in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science:

Maya has often been castigated as a pessimistic concept describing the spatio-temporal world as worthless and illusory. The growing interest in the ideas of quantum entanglement and multiple possible worlds by quantum physicists might provide a welcome note for the dynamic and positive interpretations of maya, which hold that the world is “real while experiencing, but not independently.”⁷

In contemplating the doctrine of maya, the author is reminded of the weird world of quantum physics. But what is the probative value of this resemblance? How much of it depends upon an individual’s level of tolerance for resemblance? I’ve had students with very low tolerance. The more they read, the more everything started to sound more or less the same. A poet once pointed out that any word sounds more like any other word than either of them sounds like silence.⁸

Suppose there were some acceptable objective criteria for resemblance, and some nonbiased way to sort through the countless Vedic ideas and scientific ideas, so to find relevant analogues. Could we then vindicate Vivekananda’s conclusion that science is echoing the Vedas? Why not rather say that the Vedas are echoing science? Remember, we’ve set aside the interpretation according to which Indian thought had a causal role in the history of science. So, we have no more reason to say that science approximates Hindu wisdom than to say that Hindu wisdom approximates science. Given a mere resemblance between an Indian and a European idea, the self-appointed representatives of “the East” have no more warrant to claim the European idea as Indian than the representatives of “the West” would have to claim the Indian idea as European.

Besides, if resemblance is the order of the day, then countless other ancient traditions have equal claim to be “pre-echoes” of modern science. The writings of the pre-Socratic materialist philosopher Empedocles contain tantalizing suggestions (composed in verse) of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection. Should we say that modern biology rediscovered Greek wisdom? Greek and Indian wisdom? The whole thing begins to look like a joke. Empedocles was from the city of Acragas in southern Sicily. Do his remarks redound to the glory of Sicilians, Greeks, Mediterraneans, pagans?

There is at work here a deeper and potentially dangerous conceit: in identifying those entities that deserve praise for their science-reminiscent insights, this way of thinking arbitrarily subdivides a complex social reality in the interest of mobilizing solidarity around some community. Who precisely should get credit for the Vedas? Surely not, as the Hindu Right would have it, the Indian nation as a whole, the same nation that is a secular democracy and home to the third-largest Muslim population in the world.

The irony is that the echoes or analogues of contemporary science in world history could be seen as evidence of the universality of science. Instead they are brandished by neo-Hindus and their post-modernist allies as proof of the cultural specificity of science or the superiority of a particular tradition. Despite the undeniable fact that the sciences have their cultural and historical roots in particular societies—Europe in the middle of the last millenium—they are universal in at least three senses. The sciences are universal in scope. Their validity is not bounded by epoch, place, or people. They are universal in practice: open in principle to all individual practitioners, fruitfully adoptable by any willing peoples. Finally, they are as nonproprietary as any human striving. They belong to no one people.

One with Nothing

Vivekananda’s message is now found alongside a quite different one, to the effect that the materialistic worldview of Western science is impoverished and incomplete and must be supplemented by the more holistic, pluralistic, and spiritual outlook of the Indian tradition. And so one reads from the same chapter in the Oxford Handbook: “What distinguishes the Indian way of thinking from what we today call the Western way of thinking is the wholesome connection present in the Hindu world between theoretical, experiential, and transcendental issues.” This is contrasted with “the linearity and immediate convenience that is provided by rigid, reductionistic structures of knowledge.”

For those readers looking for a thorough draining of the cognitive swamp where pop physics and New Age mysticism are brewed together by neo-Hindu gurus, I recommend Victor Stenger’s Unconscious Quantum. For present purposes, it is enough to note that the neo-Hindu critique of science is in tension with, if not strictly incompatible with, the previous argument for the scientific validity of Vedanta. For if the greatness of science has brought it around to ancient Indian wisdom, as Vivekananda postulated, then to that extent science does not stand in need of ancient Indian wisdom to correct its shortcomings.

In the end, it must be said that in light of modern cosmology, Indian philosophy was dead wrong about the biggest thing of all. We cannot be one with everything. Our world—everything living and inorganic—is a fig seed in a desert. Physics tells us that the ordinary matter that makes up all the planets, stars, and gases—and everything we’ve ever known—accounts for only 5 percent of the mass of the universe. If there is a One, we are not in on it. Its “finest essence” is not ours. We can identify with the fig seed, with life, even with life’s lifeless chemistry. But everything else, the rest of the universe, is near completely, fundamentally Other. The unbiased observer would see we clearly do not belong here. Here then is our self-portrait from the sciences so far, and verily anti-Vedic at that: a fig tree clinging, with the not-fig infinite on all sides. When you do get your mail-order-enlightenment kit, it will come stamped, “Void where not prohibited.”

Notes

1. Chāndogya 12. 1-3, translation from Robert Ernest Hume, ed., The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 247-248.
2. Chāndogya 11. 1, ibid., p. 271.
3. Svetāsvatara 4. 9-10, ibid., p. 404.
4. Kena 2. 3, ibid, p. 337.
5. In Edwin S. Gaustad and Mark A. Noll, eds., A documentary history of religion in America: Since 1887 (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), p. 72. The term Vedānta, literally, ‘Veda’s end,’ since the medieval period has come to refer to a dominant philosophical school of interpretation of Vedic teachings.
6. Meera Nanda, “Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and ‘Vedic science’” Frontline vol 20, no. 26 (December 20, 2003-January 2, 2004); http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2026/stories/20040102000607800.htm; accessed August 12, 2009.
7. Sangeetha Menon, “Hinduism and Science,” in Philip Clayton and Zachary R. Simpson eds., The Oxford handbook of religion and science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 19.
8. I attribute this thought to the American poet William Stafford: “I assume that all syllables rhyme, sort of. That is, any syllable sounds more like any other syllable than either of them sounds like silence.” Thanks to Philip Dacey for this.

Nair had reason for confidence. Since 1993 the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, or PSLV, had been a success story of India’s space program. What’s more, earlier that morning Nair and more than a dozen other top space scientists had visited the Tirupati temple of Lord Venkateswara, where they laid a miniature prototype of the PSLV-C6 at the feet of the deity (a form of the sustainer-god Vishnu also known as Lord Balaji) and offered prayers for a successful mission.

Was this some kind of prank? Was it a symbolic gesture, intended in fact not for Balaji but instead for the more earthbound audience of the public, a Hindu equivalent of those prayer breakfasts that U.S. presidents cannot seem to go without? Or did the scientists actually believe in Balaji? Did they consider the temple ritual a proper part of their public scientific activities?

Indian scientists under study

This last question has been put to India’s scientific community as part of a national survey of professional scientists released last year by Trinity College’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society in cooperation with the Center for Inquiry-India, headquartered not far from Tirupathi in Hyderabad (full disclosure: I had a hand in coordinating the project while at Center for Inquiry). The first-of-its-kind study, entitled Worldviews and Opinions of Scientists: India 2007-2008, gathered responses to an email questionnaire from 1,100 participants at 130 universities and research institutes.¹ The results reveal a fascinating portrait of science and religion in the subcontinental context.

Most readers of Skeptical Inquirer have committed to memory the figures from the famous 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S.: only 7.5 percent of physicists and astronomers and 5.5 percent of biological scientists believe in a personal deity.² By contrast, Worldviews found that most Indian scientists are believers. Only one-fourth are non-theists, while 66 percent identified as Hindu. Half hold that homeopathy and prayer are efficacious; 90 percent approve of the offering of university degrees in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional practice that prescribes various herbs, oils, and spices to bring the diseased back into balance with the universe. The blessing of rocket launches turned out to be relatively contentious, with 41 percent approving the 2005 event and 46 disapproving (the remaining 13 percent were not sure what they thought about it).

The Worldviews survey sparked plenty of conversation, especially in the Indian press, about whether such attitudes are defensible or whether they are a dangerous betrayal of the civic duty—mentioned in the national constitution—to cultivate a “scientific temper.” However, the survey did not attempt to explain why it is that so many Indian scientists cleave to non-naturalistic worldviews, as compared to their American counterparts. After all, the rates of religiosity in the Indian and American general populations are not so dramatically different.

Was this simply a case of Pascal’s Wager: Ignore Venkateswara, thereby risking his displeasure and aeronautical disaster; or supplicate Venkateswara, thereby risking nothing and possibly gaining favor? One classic objection to Pascal—the so-called Many Gods objection—points out that the wagering party, who resorts to a gamble precisely because he lacks conclusive evidence about the divine, cannot know which of all the possible gods might exist, and therefore which he might be enraging by wagering on another (to say nothing of the possibility of a supreme being who smites all those and only those who believe just to escape a smiting).³ The unimaginable pluralism of India, with its 22 official languages and thousands of castes, extends to its supernatural precincts as well, with over 200,000 gods and goddesses crowding temples and rickshaw triptychs. Many Gods with a vengeance! In this case, one might worry about Indra, formerly the king of the gods who was demoted to running the weather and who is quite possibly disgruntled about it. As with India’s infamous bureaucracy, the trouble may lie in figuring out which official to propitiate.

Science and reactionary modernism

A more general (if not generalizing) explanation of Indian scientists’ worldviews would point to the syncretism of Indian thought on the whole. Not unlike its urban centers, where livestock jostle with stockbrokers and illiterate rural immigrants mix with techno-billionaires, India’s religious, scientific, and philosophical minds appear capable of housing a wild admixture of seemingly incongruent occupants. The expansiveness of Hindu cosmogony, already noted by me and numerous other commentators, always leaves room for another entity with its own compartmentalized jurisdiction. You can have your quarks and Vishnu too; they’re all Brahma in the end somehow.

During the colonial era, Indian intellectuals lived amid ambivalent attitudes to the European scientific tradition and the Enlightenment outlook associated with it. According to Meera Nanda, a philosopher of science and a consultant on the Worldviews study, although many of these thinkers and social reformers looked to “the West” for the tools they needed to bring their country into modernity, they at the same time sought to vindicate the value of the indigenous. Nanda explains,

keen to assert their national pride against the colonizers, these intellectuals tended to subsume the new ideas into the unreformed tradition. Rather than agitate against those elements of the inherited tradition that negated the content and the spirit of the modern worldview, neo-Hindu intellectuals began to find homologies between the new worldview of science, liberalism, and even Christian ideas of monotheism, and the high-Brahminical Vedic literature, especially the philosophy of non-dualism.⁴

In contemporary politics, one can find a similar pattern of “reactionary modernism” taken to the extreme in the discourse rightwing Hindu nationalism:

. . . Hindu nationalism asserts itself not by rejecting the modern ideas of democracy, secularism, and scientific reason, but by aggressively restating them in a Hindu civilizational idiom. The champions of Hindu nationalism pretend to set themselves apart from their Islamic and Christian counterparts by claiming to be enlightened champions of democracy, secularism, science, all of which they claim to find in the perennial wisdom of the Vedas, Vedānta, and in the original, uncorrupted Vedic institution of four varnas or castes.⁵

In practice, then, the discourse of science and modernity can be impressed into the service of a reactionary agenda that re-asserts a traditional Hindu social order and national identity. In her excellent book Prophets Facing Backwards, Nanda documents a convergence with postmodern critiques that would make science a culturally specific narrative. On this view, India has its own authentically saffron-colored science. Ayurveda is literally a “science of life”; the celebrated tolerance of Hinduism means remaining open to the utility of astrology.

It is just this kind of thinking that alarms Nanda and Innaiah Narisetti, the chairman of Center for Inquiry-India, who told the Sunday Hindustan Times in 2008, “It is disturbing to see scientists touching the feet of godmen and taking replicas of rockets before their launch to the Tirupati temple. If scientists do these things, what message will it send to the general public?”⁶

A widening debate

As it happened, that morning in May the PSLV-C6 blasted off on time and placed its two satellites into polar sun-synchronous orbits roughly 18 minutes later, thanks to the dedication of its team of technicians and engineers. Nair might just as well have offered his prayers to Robert Goddard. One of the satellites deployed was HAMSAT, which would relay the signals of ham radio operators. Its launch represented the government’s recognition of the critical role played by the amateur radio community in coordinating disaster management in the wake of supercyclones and tsunamis. PSLV-6 also put into orbit the solar-powered CARTOSAT-1, which was carrying two earth-imaging cameras capable of high-resolution applications in agriculture, water-management, and cartography.

A survey of the landscape of Indian thought and scientific opinion makes one thing clear. Rationalists cannot simply insist on the value of cultivating a scientific temper. The debate now turns on the very meaning of science. Until recently this debate has largely been internal to India, but that may be changing. We now have the Worldviews survey. Meanwhile, Amartya Sen has been pressing for more cosmopolitan models of Indian identity.⁷ And thanks to Narisetti, there is now a Telegu translation of the first chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion.

Still, real philosophical work remains to be done at a smaller scale of analysis. Is it possible to harmonize the notion of argument by analogy, so important in classical Indian logic and epistemology since 7^th century B.C.E, with post-Galilean quantitative methods and contemporary accounts of induction and evidentiary confirmation? And what could it mean to say that any mode of inquiry belongs to one civilization or another in the first place?

Notes

1. See worldviewsofscientists.org.
2. Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, Leading Scientists Still Reject God. Nature 1998; 394, 313.
3. For a critical discussion of the Many Gods Objection, see Jeff Jordan, Pascal’s Wager: Pragmatic Arguments and Belief in God (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2006).
4. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backwards: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 46-47.
5. Ibid., 38.
6. C. Sujit Chandra Kumar, Is HE for real? Sunday Hindustan Times, June 22, 2008.
7. See Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

Several months earlier in San Francisco the American poet and playwright had crafted the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations, which declaims, “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” In November, MacLeish, who had volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I and gone on to serve as Librarian of Congress and assistant to the Secretary of State, was in London serving as the United States delegate to a conference of 44 nations that had gathered to create a new UN institution. It would later come to be known as the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.

They met in the Institute of Civil Engineers, one of the few buildings unscathed by German bombs, and on November 16, 1945 adopted a Constitution that opens with MacLeish’s line, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.” It goes on to declare that

a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.¹

The parties to the Constitution, affirming their commitment to “full and equal opportunities for education for all,” “the unrestricted pursuit of objective truth,” and “the free exchange of ideas and knowledge,” created UNESCO

to develop and to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other's lives;

with the ultimate purpose of

advancing, through the educational and scientific and cultural relations of the peoples of the world, the objectives of international peace and of the common welfare of mankind for which the United Nations Organization was established and which its Charter proclaims.

Viewed from the vantage point of today, the hope radiating from this document is almost blinding, the distance of the intervening years making it seem only more improbably bright. Somehow the delegates’ optimism burned more powerfully than Oppenheimer’s “thousand suns” that just months before had incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki—they too begun in the minds of men.

Julian Huxley and the universal culture

Science almost didn’t make it, along with education and culture, into the organization’s name and mandate. The ‘S’ in UNESCO was thanks in large part to the urging of the British biologist Julian Huxley (grandson of T.H.). After MacLeish declined the post of Director-General in order to return to academic life, Huxley went to Paris to take up the task. In a 1946 essay entitled UNESCO, Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, he boldly maintained, with the smoldering globe in full view, that what the world needs is more, not less, science. The philosophy of UNESCO, in his vision, is in essence the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment:

Science . . . is by its nature opposed to dogmatic orthodoxies and to the claims of authority. . . . Science, however, on the basis of its fruitful experience, asserts with confidence that a priori reasoning is inadequate to arrive at truth, that truth is never complete and explanation never fully or eternally valid.²

The purpose of the organization, Huxley thought, is to encourage the spread of this philosophy everywhere:

Anything that [UNESCO] can do to satisfy these needs through promoting education, science and culture, will be a step towards a unified way of life and of looking at life, a contribution to a foundation for the unified philosophy we require.³

The scientific enterprise itself, Huxley observed, is “already the most international activity of man,” and so provides our best model of a new kind of polity for a new kind of world, a cosmopolitan community that transcends frontiers to collaborate for the betterment of humankind. In the first report of the Director-General of UNESCO he spoke of a “universal culture” that will grow from the global cultivation of free, critical inquiry.

One need not share Huxley’s enthusiasm for “evolutionary humanism” (to say nothing of eugenics) to resonate to his call for science as a cultural commons, a buffer against sectarianism and nationalism. Contemplate the Large Hadron Collider, its subterranean vaults glittering, deep enough to house the nave of Notre Dame. The design and construction of this marvel near Geneva brought together funds and specialists from 60 countries, including military rivals like India and Pakistan. If they find the God Particle, it will belong to all of them, all of us.

The politicization of “culture”

The one thing that Huxley did not anticipate was the rest of the 20^th century: the tectonic effects of the collapse of empire and the emergence of the Third World. Decolonization and the rise of non-western nationalisms radically altered the political realities at the UN and the discourse among the so-called international community. As developing countries asserted their equal dignity and autonomy on the world stage, they pressed in the international legal order for “cultural rights” and the right of peoples to “self-determination” even at the expense of universal values—now conceived as the values of one particular culture, “the West”. Meanwhile, post-colonial and multiculturalist academic theories elevated cultural membership to the preeminent source of personal identity.

With these political and intellectual shifts came a shift in the meaning of “culture” in international discourse. In 1945, it denoted cultural productions—the works of art and letters, architecture, cuisine. Throughout the 1950s, the Director-General reports classified cultural activities as “the preservation and protection of art, heritage, and artists . . . .”⁴ But in the post-colonial landscape, culture increasingly came to stand in for peoples, particularly those who hadn’t (lately) run an empire. Culture went from a What to a Who.

By 1982, UNESCO’s Mexico Declaration on Cultural Policies could define culture as “the whole complex of distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional features that characterize a society or social group,” and it paired each culture with a people:

1. Every culture represents a unique and irreplaceable body of values since each people's traditions and forms of expression are its most effective means of demonstrating its presence in the world.
2. The assertion of cultural identity therefore contributes to the liberation of peoples. Conversely, any form of domination constitutes a denial or an impairment of that identity.⁵

Culture-as-people recalls the German romantic notion of the Volk, a community bonded by blood and distinguished by its language, religion, and customs. And as Johann Gottfried Herder would have it, Volk comes first. States must recognize “the right of each people and cultural community to affirm and preserve its cultural identity and have it respected by others” and should “foster the assimilation of scientific and technological knowledge without detriment to each people’s capacities and values” [italics added].

In the context of this discourse, Huxley’s thesis of a universal, science-enriched culture must be either irrelevant or false. For if it means culture-as-production, then the thesis concerns something that no longer concerns most of the international community. If instead it means culture-as-people, then the thesis is ludicrous. Scientists are decidedly not a community bound by blood or soil. And no one—not even a fan of world government such as Huxley—supposes that a world culture would or should entail one world people.

Instead, science itself has been dismembered by culturist politics, exemplified by the Vedic science movement in India, with its ties to the Hindu Right. The Indian experience suggests that a society can adopt the modalities of science without fully absorbing the Enlightenment culture that in European history accompanied it. Making the irony complete, in 1982 a coalition of Islamic states launched its own brand of UNESCO that replaces the “United” with a particular “culture”: the Islamic Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It promotes science “within the framework of the civilizational reference of the Islamic world and in the light of the human Islamic values and ideals.”⁶

An unclinical trial

Of the founding of UNESCO, one member of the British delegation said it was “the most underrated conference in all history.”⁷ And it was either that, or the most overreaching. We still do not know which. Before it could be truly tested, Huxley’s vision was abandoned by the United Nations. Quite independently, however, the world’s scientific institutions themselves embarked on a vast unintentional experiment, an unclinical trial of the idea that science will bring people and peoples closer together. Is there in fact a universal culture of science? If so, what is it? The experiment is now running, and it will be examined in subsequent installments of this series, “Circumnavigations.”

Notes

1. Available at unesco.org (PDF)
2. Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (Preparatory Commission of UNESCO, 1946), 34.
3. Ibid., 62.
4. Katérina Stenou, ed., UNESCO and the Issue of Cultural Diversity: Review and Strategy, 1946- 2004 (UNESCO, 2004); unesco.org (PDF); accessed on June 2, 2009.
5. Mexico City Declaration on Cultural Policies, World Conference on Cultural Policies, Mexico City, 26 July - 6 August 1982; unesco.org (PDF); accessed June 2, 2009.
6. ISESCO Charter, Article 4(a); unesco.org; accessed June 2, 2009.
7. Stanley Meisler, United Nations: The First Fifty Years (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 223.